SpaceX has applied to the FCC for permission to operate up to one million satellites serving as data centers. The direct thermal effect is negligible; atmospheric fallout is much less so.
Filed on January 30, 2026 and put into public consultation on February 4, SpaceX's application relates to the operation of one million non-geostationary satellites between 500 and 2,000 kilometres of altitude. The reference design, called AI1, provides for an average calculation load of 120 kilowatts per machine, 150 at the peak, for a scale of 70 meters — almost 120 gigawatts of computing capacity if the constellation were fully deployed.
Intuitively, the heat dissipated by this calculation weighs almost nothing on the climate scale: the modelled forcing is more than ten thousand times less than the 2.72 watts per square metre assigned by the IPCC to the entire human radiative forcing. The problem is elsewhere.
It is in what launches and atmospheric re-entry inject into the upper atmosphere. Black carbon emitted by rocket engines warms the stratosphere — a tenfold increase in traffic could produce regional anomalies of 0.5 to 2°C. Upon re-entry, aluminum structures are made up of aluminium oxides and nitrogen oxides, two families involved in the destruction of ozone; A 2025 modelling study of 10,000 tonnes of released alumina annually found thermal anomalies of approximately 1.5 °C in the mean atmosphere. With a life span of five years per satellite, such a constellation would involve about 200,000 replacements — and therefore as many returns — every year.
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